The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  And that would make her miss being alive, too—observing Tommy’s weirdo mating rituals—except that vampires are even stupider about most of that stuff. Bette really needs to get to know some people whose personal relationships don’t turn them into emotionally damaged idiots.

  Waving a goodbye to Tommy as he talks to Michelle, Bette climbs back down the tree and goes to Rose’s window, tapping a quick beat against the glass with her fingertips. The sound it makes reminds Bette of the skittering many-legged monsters who used to dart from shadow to shadow in her nightmares when she was a kid. Bette was a kind of messed-up kid, in a lot of respects. She only stopped being scared of those monsters after Rose drew her a picture of them, based on Bette’s description. They seemed much less powerful once they’d been pinned down on paper.

  Rose releases the latch, stepping back to let Bette inside. There’s only one small bedside lamp on, painting the rest of the basement in shadows. The playlist has reached the last song. It’s one Bette found on an old local compilation; she remembers the title catching her eye. For The Expatriates Of Human Civilization. The irony of that tugs one corner of her mouth up into a half-smile, now.

  “I can see why you’re home early,” Bette says. Rose has a bad gravel rash on one side of her face, like she fell hard onto bare concrete without having a chance to protect her head with her hands. The cuts look fresh, and painful. “The killing spree hit a snag tonight?”

  Rose glares. “You’re trying to take a moral high ground here?”

  “Nah.” Bette shakes her head and grins. “Just trying to point out that we’re not as different as you’d like to think.”

  Rose’s scowl turns vulnerable and hurt and she looks away from Bette. “I don’t want to think we’re different.”

  Bette doesn’t know how to fix this, so she finds something else to talk about, so she can fill the silence and not feel how broken the edges of it are. “I know what’ll help that scrape.”

  Rose meets her eyes again, looking wary. “What?”

  Bette raises her own left wrist to her mouth and bites down neatly, just enough to nick the thickest vein. Considering how infrequently Rose does any cleaning in the basement, it would be a bad idea to spill blood on the floor. Not that it would really be noticeable, among the paint splatters and remnants of knocked-over drinks already decorating the floor.

  Rose’s wary look turns horrified and she takes a half-step back. “Don’t.”

  “You know it won’t turn you,” Bette points out sensibly, offering up the open wound and taking a step forward. “Not even if I bit you again. Not even if I bit you every night. You only turn if you die. Like I did.” She takes another step toward Rose.

  “Stop it!” Rose snaps. “Don’t… I don’t…” She curls the fingers of one hand around Bette’s forearm, the other palm supporting underneath Bette’s wrist as Rose dips her head down to close her mouth around the cut.

  And there it is. The missing part from somewhere inside Bette, the ghost of what she’s lost. Rose swallows a mouthful of Bette’s blood and it’s like songs after being deaf, colour after blindness. Rose is the piece of Bette that was vanished, the phantom limb, now fused back into her circulatory system like a Frankenstein monster being transformed from pieces of a dead body back into a coherent whole.

  Bette manages to lean in and press her fangs into Rose’s throat, reopening the healing marks from last time and swallowing down the first bright mouthful with a full-body shudder. Rose responds by tightening her grip on Bette’s arm, sucking at her wrist to draw the blood out faster. It’s like a fight, or a dance, one of the really good slamming pits Bette used to go in where it felt like everyone’s body was a piece of one seething moving entity, the soul of the crowd, shoving and pushing and bruising themselves and feeling more alive than at any other moment.

  They have to stop when Rose eventually faints, blood loss knocking her out before the energy of Bette’s blood can reach Rose’s own internal systems. It’s starting to work, though. The scrape on Rose’s face is already looking older, more healed.

  Bette lays Rose out carefully on the rumpled sheets of the pull-out couch, tucking thick blankets up over her so she’ll be warm through the remainder of the night.

  In white paint, across the dark tangle of Rose’s pain-painting, Bette writes in thick looping brush-handwriting. I hate that we never talk now. Then she climbs out the window, and back into the cold.

  ~

  From: fire.proof.heart

  To: frankenstein_girl

  Subject: Do you still use this email address

  Message:

  Bette?

  —

  From: frankenstein_girl

  To: fire.proof.heart

  Subject: Re: Do you still use this email address

  Message:

  Yes, this is still my email. Yours is new?

  —

  From: fire.proof.heart

  To: frankenstein_girl

  Subject: Re: Re: Do you still use this email address

  Message:

  Yeah I got a new one.

  I had to skip school today. Too tired, & the light hurts my eyes. Why are you awake?

  PS You didn’t have to ruin my painting, bitch.

  —

  From: frankenstein_girl

  To: fire.proof.heart

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Do you still use this email address

  Message:

  What’s your new email address mean? I didn’t ruin your painting I collaborated. It’s 2x cool now admit it.

  I can’t sleep. Listening to music. Black Flag full volume on earphones rules the world. Never tried it before because I was afraid of goin deaf.

  —

  From: fire.proof.heart

  To: frankenstein_girl

  Subject: Twice as cool if you’re blind maybe

  Message:

  The only thing I admit about your “collaborating” is in my subject line. Even your finger painting was challenged at preschool. Stay away from my paintings heathen >:(

  >:(

  You won’t get any sleep if you have black flag up full volume dumbass.

  My new address is from stories about how Joan of Arc’s heart stayed intact after she was burned at the stake. Ppl threw it on a fire a 2nd time & it still didn’t burn even then. She had a fire proof heart.

  —

  From: frankenstein_girl

  To: fire.proof.heart

  Subject: you wouldn’t know cool if it bit you

  Message:

  Wouldn’t it be wicked if there was a mad scientist who got the brain of some psycho and was putting it in a frankenstein and then the mad scientist got the heart of joan of arc or someone else really righteous who had a badass heart like that. Would the frankenstein use its powers for good or for awesome???

  Stop calling me a heathen and a dumbass. You’re a total bully. Hey when is your musical on?

  —

  From: fire.proof.heart

  To: frankenstein_girl

  Subject: … ive only been bitten by a DUMBASS HEATHEN so youre right i wouldnt know cool if it bit me

  Message:

  The musical’s on in one week, for a week of nights. You’re not coming to it.

  My costume is hilarious. I have green tights. Jamie from the school paper took all these pictures of it to go with the review he’s gonna write. I LOOK SO BAD.

  —

  From: frankenstein_girl

  To: fire.proof.heart

  Subject: You suck!

  Message:

  Why can’t I come to the musical I want to see your costume. Maybe I was wrong to call you batman, you might really be robin. Green tights whoa sexy.

  —

  From: fire.proof.heart

  To: frankenstein_girl

  Subject: Re: You suck!

  Message:

  Please don’t.

  TIMOTHY

  After Ilia vanished, small things shifted in the daily life of the village. The oldest o
f the elders, wizened little men and women who seemed to have aged beyond gender, all of them equally small and crabbed and as creased as the skin of dried-out apples, could remember the protections used when they were children, and such disappearances were more common. The upior, they said, was a monster who lived in the forest, a dead creature who had been a wicked man, or a witch with a stinger under her tongue, or a purple-faced devil who gobbled fish and went back under the ground each night at mid-night, depending on which elder was telling the story.

  They couldn’t agree on what the upior was, but they agreed well enough on how to guard against it. “Garlic,” they all said. “Scatter cloves of garlic on the sills of all the windows. The upior hates garlic cloves because they look like his teeth. He spits his teeth out after he dies, ptoo ptoo, and the garlic looks the same as them.” They’d made the spitting sound, grinning with gummy mouths almost empty of teeth themselves, and laugh as the children listening to the stories shuddered and cried in terror. The elders were much too old to be afraid of death.

  “Poppy seeds on the road,” they said. “And fire. They are scared of fire. Fire will always drive them away.”

  “The best way to kill the upior is a spike of wood through the heart, bang!” they said. “One strike with a mallet. But never more than one strike, or the upior will wake up and gobble down all your blood.”

  Ledishka was not impressed by most of these suggestions. “Poppy seeds? One strike with a mallet but not two? What nonsense. I’m sure they don’t believe things like that in Constantinople. Nobody educated or cosmopolitan could ever believe stupid village ideas like that!” she ranted as she helped her stepmother chop vegetables. Timothy was skinning the rabbits for the stew, trying to pull the fur off as clean as he could so that he and Ledishka could make new hats from it. They were growing too big for their old ones, which would be kept until Stasja and baby Viktor were big enough to get more wear out of them.

  “If the upior was really once a man, then it is as irrational as any other man,” Zoscya retorted. “I nearly drowned when I was small, and so I hate the water. If I had to spit my teeth out, I would hate anything which reminded me of my teeth. It makes as much sense as anything to me.”

  None of them had any doubt that the upior’s fear of fire was real enough, though. Even in the winter, when the fire was all that kept families from freezing to death in their beds, everyone knew not to trust it. Fire was a wolf, not a dog: it could be calmed, but never tamed.

  So when Ledishka shook Timothy out of his sleep one night, and told him to put on his boots and his coat and come with her to try to meet the monster, he wasn’t surprised to see that she held their father’s best flint in her hands, and twigs to use as kindling.

  ~

  Timothy’s snapped out of his memories when Alexander speaks, breaking the quiet they’ve each been working in for the last half-hour.

  “Even after decades of working with Chinese importers and other business leaders, the enjoyment hasn’t started to wear thin,” he tells Timothy, as if the genuine, enthusiastic smile on his face and the brightness of his eyes wasn’t indication enough that he liked the task at hand. “I’ve never seen a frontier that was so hungry for expansion, or so ruthless about achieving it. And it’s in a place where looking Chinese is an advantage, for a change.”

  A twist of bitterness creeps into Alexander’s words and expression, just for a moment, before he moves on, turning the page of Chinese writing around so it faces Timothy, who’s sitting on the other side of their reading table.

  “You see that word, there?” Alexander points. “That’s dakuan. It’s the term for ‘corrupt business dealer’, but these days some—those who know that vampires exist—also use it to denote that someone’s one of us. They chose that word so as not to get us confused with the jiang shi, the hopping vampires of Chinese mythology. Think of that! A culture where we’re an accepted, slightly frowned upon part of economic reality, seen as having more in common with CEOs who take bribes than with monsters from fairy stories.” Alexander’s grin gets broader.

  “I don’t know, being a hopping vampire sounds kind of fun,” Timothy observes. “It’d be like having a built-in pogo stick.”

  From Bette’s room there are the muted sounds of a number being entered into her phone, which Timothy knows means she’s calling home. It’s one of the few small safety precautions she concedes to: she never saves her mother’s number in the memory of her phone, because stealing phones is often the way rival gangs gain an advantage of one kind or another over vampires. Blake has an especially impressive collection of handsets he’s taken during brawls, and Bette and Jay sometimes sift through them, looking for the most fashionable or expensive ones to claim as their own.

  “Hey Mom, it’s me,” Bette says. Timothy gives up on trying to read the digital rights contract he’s looking over for one of Alexander’s bands, and listens to her conversation instead.

  “No, that’s cool, you don’t have to hang up and call me back, the school covers my phone costs… part of my scholarship, I guess… yeah, I know, I’ve just been really busy, I lose track of… yeah… so, um, how are you?… I miss you too. What?… no, I told you, I’ve just been busy, and what does that mean anyway, ‘my voice sounds like I don’t mean that’, that’s total… Mom, shut up for a second, okay? Just… no! I promise your little girl hasn’t gone and grown up into a woman and doesn’t need you anymore, that’s about the least likely fucking thing to… sorry, sorry, I’ll watch my language. And my tone, yes. I’m sorry… yeah, Rose and I talk in email sometimes… yeah… um, I guess? There are a bunch of guys here I hang out with… no, just friends who are boys, none of… okay, there’s maybe someone who’s, you know, a someone… I am not playing the pronoun game! I just don’t want to tell my mother about my love life…

  “How’s everyone at home? Have you seen anyone from the family recently?… yes, I’m changing the subject. Humour me. Are you gonna go to the school musical? Rose was telling me about it, it sounds hilarious… no, it’s not a comedy… I wish I was going… yeah, what night?…

  “Because I don’t want to try calling you while you’re at the musical, that’s why I want to know what night… I do so call you! Are you not, in fact, conversing right at this very moment? Can we talk about you for a change? I feel like I’m being interrogated here…

  “That sounds cool. You should do that for sure, a cruise sounds so old-school elegant and classy, you know?… no, it’s cool, a bunch of kids stay here over vacation anyway. It would be no big deal… I miss you too, but you shouldn’t put your life on pause because of me… yes, exactly. There’ll be lots of other school breaks to catch up in. I gotta go, Mom, someone else wants… no, I’m fine, I’ve just got a cold and it makes me sound all choked up. You know me, I’ve always been a total hopeless case in winter… okay, I promise… I promise! I’ll call again soon… Love you too. Bye.”

  ~

  Timothy’s current for-pleasure reading is an autobiography. It’s usually an autobiography, or a biography, usually of a young woman who went out into the world to conquer her own destiny: rock stars, writers, heroin addicts. Timothy reads them all, voraciously. In the absence of a coherent life narrative of his own, he gobbles those which have been written down by others.

  In the village, others had thought he was a boy who wished in his heart that he’d been born a girl. Ilia was taller, his voice a little deeper than Timothy’s own, and so it was assumed that Timothy was the one out of the pair who played the role of would-be wife.

  To say then that a boy wanted to be a girl, however, was as meaningless and silly as the time when one of the fat white ducks from down the road began to follow the farm dogs all around the field, as if it too could herd sheep and collect the bodies of the rabbits which Ledishka struck with arrows from her vicious little bow.

  “That duck thinks it’s a dog!” their father laughed with his booming laugh, slapping a broad thigh with a broad palm.

  That’s
how little a boy wanting to be a girl meant, to the people in Timothy’s village. A duck could want to be a dog all it liked, but it was still a duck.

  These days things are different. Boys can be boys, or be girls, as their heart and soul dictates they should be. Girls can be girls or boys. Either can even, best of all, opt to be a thing that falls in-between all the choices before them.

  Timothy likes being an in-between. He never wanted to be a girl, not as the villagers thought he did. He likes his body, its flat planes and sharp hips and wide, knobby feet. He doesn’t wish he’d been born different, and feels sorry for those who do, for their lives are made so much more complicated through what is more or less a cosmic clerical error in the distribution of bodies.

  But, content as he is with the shape he has, there are affinities which Timothy feels with women, a sense of himself as being like them, which goes as deep as blood. He feels that he’s a mix of both and neither, somewhere in the space between the absolutes on either side.

  On the one evening he’d spent talking with Rose, before Lily shot him in his hand and set their wild ballet of chaos into motion, Timothy had discovered that Rose was like him, in that respect. She knew she was something other than a girl. At least, she was different to what she’d been taught girls were, just as Timothy wasn’t what he’d been brought up to think of as a proper boy.

  Rose, in her everyday world, dressed in pants and shirts. She never bothered with makeup, and barely with a hairbrush, and kept her fingernails trimmed and short.

  “In another era,” she’d remarked. “I would’ve been called a butch, or a tom.”

  There were names for her in this era, too: dyke, bulldyke, lezzo, tranny. The first three were labels which didn’t quite fit, for though Rose’s tendency was “mostly toward girls, I guess”, her sexuality cared less about her partner’s gender and more about Rose’s poisonous contempt for anything boorish or mediocre.